A MOMENT TO SAVOR - AT 5:56 P.M. ET:  When did you ever expect to read these words at Urgent Agenda - "The BBC has done some good work"?

Well, history is made.  The BBC has done some good work.  The usually, and usually hopeless left-wing news operation has ripped the mask off a leading "environmentalist," with some tough questioning:

The outgoing leader of Greenpeace has admitted his organization’s recent claim that the Arctic Ice will disappear by 2030 was “a mistake.” Greenpeace made the claim in a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts,” which said there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming.

Under close questioning by BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on the “Hardtalk” program, Gerd Leipold, the retiring leader of Greenpeace, said the claim was wrong.

“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030. … That may have been a mistake,” he said.

And...

Sackur said the claim was inaccurate on two fronts, pointing out that the Arctic ice is a mass of 1.6 million square kilometers with a thickness of 3 km in the middle, and that it had survived much warmer periods in history than the present.

The BBC reporter accused Leipold and Greenpeace of releasing “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism.”

Leipold’s admission that Greenpeace issued misleading information is a major embarrassment to the organization, which often has been accused of alarmism but has always insisted that it applies full scientific rigor in its global-warming pronouncements.

COMMENT:  We wonder how many millions of dollars, or tens of millions, or billions, will be spent to combat "global warming," based on junk science like that.  And yet, the trendy left, including the president of the United States, takes this stuff as gospel.

Congratulations to Stephen Sackur and "Hardtalk."

August 19, 2009